Exnihilist light

Exnihilism

Forms are objective. All content of experience is form. Things as perceived by our senses are form. Ideas conceived by our mind are form. To our naive experience everything seems to be material and ideal objects, which is why we say things are “objectively real”, known in “objective truth”. In actuality, they are all formed from infraformal material, and could be formed otherwise.

Formation is subjective. Formation is “unconscious” not because it is submerged or suppressed objective content but because its essence defies the grasp of consciousness in the exactly same way perception is imperceptible as an object of perception.

Across formations strange events occur. Epiphanies irrupt out of oblivion, ex nihilo. Superformal meaning floods into the world.

A heart pumps light through vessels of clear reception and veins of pure service.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Knowing the absence of knowing

Biography, Design, Judaism, Philosophy

I get excited when I meet service designers who entered the discipline from practical need.

Such service designers encountered some problem or set of problems they recognized as beyond the reach of their own methodology.

This is much harder than it sounds: The adage “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is profoundly true. To see beyond the expert’s disciplinary scotomas requires a poet’s originary eye.

These people recognized that they not only lacked the tools and methods to solve a kind of problem they faced, they lacked concepts and language for defining and communicating them. Despite this  conceptual chaos known as perplexity they searched out ideas, vocabulary, methods, tools and logics until they found them in service design.

There are many fine service designers out there who were drawn to service design in undergraduate school. They were presented with an array of career options and for various reasons — interest, ability and opportunity — chose service design.

But having that before-and-after experience of a real-life practical perplexity resolved into a defined, solvable problem leaves a permanent trace in a practitioner — an appreciation that is lacking in people who learned to see both the solution and the problem before they ever struggled without either.

The same is true of human-centered design in general. HCD was not always here to learn and use. It only became self-evident and inevitable only after it was, through arduous work, instaurated as a discipline. HCD was a hard-won accomplishment. People who have been trained in HCD methodologies sometimes speak knowingly about the many methods they have learned and could learn, but this knowingness betrays an obliviousness to the blind chaos and nothingness from which these methods emerged. They cannot imagine looking at a design problem and seeing only an engineering, marketing and technical writing problem. They can’t see how Don Norman did anything terribly impressive, and so perhaps his reputation should be reassessed and downgraded.

It is the same difference as people who lived through the fog and fear of historical events, whose outcomes were the furthest thing from assured, and those who learned the history with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and are blind to the blindness that permeates every unfolding present and believe the unknown only hides in darkness.

The study of history is difficult because we are so possessed by the present. It is freeing ourselves from the omniscience of now and reclaiming the unknowing of the past that is hard. It becomes much harder when our “historical fiction” revises history to force it into conformity with contemporary prejudices, instead of alien and much more interesting prejudices of the past — which are the very essence of history. Popular entertainment product like American Girls and Bridgerton exclude history from their contemporary costume dramas, and this is why young consumers of this “relatable” content are radical presentists. Every totalitarianism tries to establish its own year zero, and to lock away in oblivion the prehistory that produced it.

It is those simple world-transforming insights that are hardest to conceive, but then after, hardest to unconceive. Once we see them we cannot unsee them. We cannot even conceive life before their conception. They shape even our memories and our grasp of prehistory.

Food tastes different to people who have experienced hunger.

I hope Kabbalists recognize me as someone who came to the tradition from the most urgent need.

I was made to memorize this Emily Dickinson poem in ninth grade:

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

Letterpress “theory-practice” print

Biography, Design, Letterpress, Star

Helen and I spent yesterday parallel printing at the Stukenborg Press with art saint Bryan Baker.

I printed a third, more realistic version of the “Tend the Root” print, requested by Susan and several others who missed the realism of my first screenprinted version, and preferred it to the abstracted asterisk version. I still prefer the asterisk, for visual and symbolic reasons.

More significantly, Bryan has, after months of gentle nudging, managed to persuade me to return to manually setting lead type, which has made my letterpress obsession considerably worse.

(Last time I did this was in 1992, when I handset my wedding invitation, framed with a wood-engraved decorative border of pomegranates and dogwood blossoms. Susan and I pulled a literal all-nighter in the printing studio hand-producing the invitations. Before that, I handset the ingredients of Doritos. Legend has it my Grandpa Dave worked as a typesetter in some kind of association with Frederic Goudy. I’m also apparently somehow descended from someone connected with the founding of Charles Scribner’s Sons. I blame my ancestors for the visceral craziness I feel around books and letterpress. I also blame my design professor Richard Rose for waking this weird impulses lurking in my blood.)

I set one of my favorite aphorisms, frequently misattributed to Yogi Berra:

In theory, there is no difference
between theory and practice,
but in practice there is.

This is one of the wisest and most radically conservative and designerly utterances I have ever heard, and I love it. It demanded to be smushed into the pulpiest of papers.

Metaconversions

Philosophy, Religion

If you have experienced no authentic conversions you’ll conceive conversion as change in belief. “I used to think this, but now I think that.” You may be pretty sure you’ve experienced conversions, but that you describe it using different language. Everything transpires within the same universe. Deep changes in how we experience the universe are psychological. Subjective reality changes, but objective reality remains the same. There is much chatter about pluralism, empathy, self-awareness, understanding, ethics and even spirituality, and these epiphenomena feel important to us. They are crowned with faint but opaque halos of vague significance.

If you have experienced one authentic conversion, you’ll conceive conversion as a revelation of a formerly concealed reality. “I was blind, but now I see.” You transitioned from a false faith to the true faith. The universe veiled something infinitely profound, ineffable and important.

Once you have experienced two conversions, though, you’ll conceive conversion as transition between faiths, each with some gain and some loss. You are converted to a radically pluralistic world where conversions are a perpetual possibility. Conversions are no longer as consequential as before, because they happen against a stable background of enworlding faiths. It is a major conversion to minor conversions and sporadic trivial conversions. Liberalism is far deeper than anyone suspected!

But then, after who knows how many minor conversions — maybe six? nine? seventeen? — deep patterns emerge. We notice: When everything changes, some subtle constants never change, and these constants become impossible to doubt, at least in practice, and only if we are subjectively fastidious. And now a major conversion happens. And this one feels like the first conversion. “I was blind, but now I see.”… transition from a false faith to the true faith… something infinitely profound, ineffable and important is now plainly revealed.

Everso and the four worlds

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil

I understand that most of my recent philosophical focus has concentrated in Yesod-Malchut within the world of Beriyah, which corresponds with Keter-Da’at within the world of Yetzirah. This is where the plurality of Yetzirah’s forms converge and are constrained by the supraformal Absolute.

(The closest thing we can have to “absolute truth” are truths which are faithful to the supraformal Absolute as they grasp whatever content they comprehend. We can clearly and consistently comprehend all kinds of forms, but only some of these help us maintain our roots in transcendent reality. Many, in fact, sever these roots, in order to grasp more comprehensively, clearly or consistently. This is what Technic systematically, methodically does, in fact.)

Prior to this, I focused on Yesod-Malchut within the world of Yetzirah and Keter-Da’at of the world of Assiyah. This is where the “Everso” eversion occurs. This is where subjective potential “concavity” manifests in actual grasping of “convex” objects of experience — where intentionality finds intentional objects. Those material objects we call “objectively real” are the entities of Malchut in the world of Assiyah. And the truths we call “subjective” are, in fact, the imaginative and emotional objects of Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Geverah and Chesed. The purely conceptual, abstract objects of modern philosophy reach up into Beriyah and Chokhmah within Assiyah. Modern theology extends to Keter within Assiyah.

Assiyah is objective top to bottom, and even what it calls “subjective” (meaning “nonmaterial”) is, in terms of form, objective.

Yetzirah, though essentially formal, is formation — the act of forming — the How of formation. We cannot understand formation in direct formal terms. New terms — new How and new What — are needed to get at this level of truth. The Tree of Yetzirah is known by its objective fruits in Assiyah. Yetzirah conceives and enwords, and manifests an enworldment of Assiyah.

When it seems that we inhabit different worlds, this is because we enworld Malchut by different states of Yetzirah.

And when it seems that some of these worlds are nihilistic, alienated and alienating (or to themselves, uncompromisingly scientific, rigorous, and fully in touch with objective reality) and others of these worlds are saturated with meaning and divine light (or to others subjective, irrational, fantastical, retrograde, woowoo or dogmatic), this is because some enworldments are focused solely on Assiyah, where others are focused primarily or exclusively on Beriyah.

Judaism tries to enworld transparently between Beriyah and Assiyah. A transparent Yetzirah is angelic, in its proper sense. A Yetzirah that attempts ultimacy and autonomy (from Beriyah) is ideological.

Yetzirah, alone with Assiyah, without Beriyah, seems pluralistic. The question is only what conceptual systems — Kuhnian paradigms — can adequately organize our material actualities so we can understand and control matter.

Things get considerably more complex and constrained if we consider the subjective effect of our paradigms. Do they flood reality with meaning, beauty and hope, or do they drain it of meaning and drown us in despair? This is a function of Yetzirah’s relationship with Beriyah. Now the question is whether our conceptual systems organize our material actualities together with a relationship with the Divine One of whom we are an organic part.

One way I have expressed this is that, since the Enlightenment, we have focused exclusively on the What and the How of our experience, and bracketed the Why. Scientific method excludes all Why considerations. Liberal-Democracies proceduralize public life, and relegate all meaning to the private realm of home, business and faith community.

This moment in history witnesses a popular implosion of nihilism. It seems most people cannot find meaning in the condition we’ve created for ourselves — the enworldment of Technic, the enworldment that capitalism and communism alike enworld and inhabit — both uncritically, unconsciously and with pseudo-divine omniscience.

Intentional focus

Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Religion

In phenomenology, all consciousness is understood to be consciousness of something. We call this something the intentional object.

But must this something be an object?

By object, I do not even mean physical object. I mean forms of every kind. Objective forms are, in fact, primarily conceptual, even when we perceive them as material.

(This points to why I enjoy provoking folks who call themselves “materialists” and call them idealists who traffic in ideas about matter — without ever encountering matter herself.)

Supraformal and infraformal realities can be intended, and intended in quite different ways than objects. But most of us, apparently, only know how to intend objectively, and this is not only intellectually limiting — it is intellectually crippling. It makes religion impossible.

A better word might be “intentional focus”.

Reflexive rehabilitation of “diversity”

Politics

In my understanding, the importance of critical theory is not primarily in its methods of critique but in the focus of its critique.

The critique of critical theory’s objects of criticism are meant to afford us access to our critical own subject. The ultimate aim of the effort is to critique ourselves as interpreters, understanders, actors — and critics.

In other words: Critical theory is meant to be reflexive.

My objection to the recent identitarian turn (documented in Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap) is total loss of that reflexivity that gives critical theory its value and humanity. In identitarian critique the critic self-objectifies their own critical subject as a category (or constellation of categories) that serves as its object of criticism. But the identitarian object of “self critique” is a decoy self. The decoy self redirects attention away from the first person critical subject and focuses it exclusively on third person objects of criticism. This keeps the subject who does the criticism — (again, the critical focus of genuine critical theory) — concealed in the background, unperceived, unconscious — unconstrained by critical self-awareness — and releases it to perform all the abuses of power it prohibits on principle.

We act out a critique of objective self-categories we claim to be (an identity or intersectional identity complex), while sparing the most powerful, self-serving, most incorrigibly biased identity of all, the subject who compulsively performs the identitarian critique, and mistakes it for “objective” history, morality and reality.

Sartre famously called this self-objectifying move bad faith. In bad faith a person adopts a defined social role in place of our more protean, responsible I.

Reflexivity attempts to catch oneself in the act of delusion, distortion, neurosis. We try to notice what we imaginatively superimpose upon phenomena, what we try to ignore, or what we selectively exaggerate, suppress and distort. We actively seek out where we have been shown wrong, where our predictions have failed, where others object to our accounts and characterizations.

And we do this not for them, or, at least, not only for them. We do it because it allows us to develop better sensitivity and understanding of what is given around us — and what transcends our own minds.

This helps us be better more respectful, responsible citizens of the world — but it also enhances our understanding of the human condition — of how we, as humans, are situated within reality.

Our own experience of the world is enriched immeasurably. We can feel the mysterious ground behind mundane life. We can feel a depth of possibility, where before there was flat factuality.

All this being said: I have grown (or shrunk) to despise Progressivist identitarianism so intensely that I’ve become disproportionately, neurotically averse to its core symbols, some of which are core to my own ideals. One of these ideals is “diversity”.

I am re-embracing this word, and reaffirming my commitment to it.

Of course, my commitment to diversity is far more radical than Progressivism’s. In fact, I believe our institutions will only flourish again when Progressivism itself is subjected to its own standards of diversity in the institutions it dominates.

Progressivism, like every other power should be confronted and challenged, most of all by itself — reflexively. Progressives should be critiquing Progressivist-dominated institutions and asking what policies, practices and unacknowledged biases perpetuate, conceal and justify its abuses of power.

This work can and should be done under the banner of diversity.

Thambos

Philosophy

A footnote from Hadot’s book on Plotinus: “Thambos designates a kind of ‘sacred terror which one feels at the approach of a person or object charged with supernatural force’…”

I’m researching and actually finding books about ancient Greece’s repertoire of words designating responses to transcendence.

Again, my friend Jokin’s Basque saying comes to mind: “What has a name is real.”

Conversely, what lacks a name, lacks reality. At least for the good residents of Wordworld, where people feel happiness and sadness and anger and, now, trauma.

The view from the Tilt-a-Whirl

Philosophy

A dust storm gains visibility from the debris it picks up and sets in motion. The mass in motion makes it real. From without, it is a dark, chaotic and destructive object, tossing and trampling the land, ruining whatever blocks its path. But from its own wildly whirling standpoint, the world is already spinning out of control. Everywhere it looks it sees violent power, careening and smashing everything.

Nobody goes to a carnival just to stand and look at the rides. To really experience the carnival, climb into the Tilt-a-Whirl and watch what happens to the whole world around you. Now it is obvious who hurtles through space. It is the observers who think they stand on solid ground.

Ptolemy. Galileo. Einstein.

Whirl

Philosophy

There truly is no point in arguing into a closed epistemic-moral-logical circle, especially when that circle touches neither ground nor sky but just swirls about in mid-air.

At this middling height and depth, nothing is anchored enough to arrest its motion.

And its motion is all it is, however much it seems to turn on its revolutionary objects.

Argument feeds its force and gives it new material to pick up and wind into its own forms, now bound up in its own twisted objectivity.

We just have to wait for it to stop whirling and to waft apart… vapid… dissipated… dead air.

Barbell

Philosophy

My boss reminded me of a drawing I used to use a lot 15 or so years ago. I called it the barbell, and it looked like this.

I would draw it very differently today. But there is a truth in it. Our exchanges with one another, whether communications, services or products, are only the foreground to a relationship.

That relationship has a continuity to it, and today I would call that continuous relationship a real being that transcends each person in the relationship. It is a collective soul — an egregore.

We can psychologically reduce that being and chop it into bits and stuff the bits into mindstuff  within physical brains. When we do that we gain control over it. We can manage it and measure it. We can buy and sell it, and that’s great. Or we can turn it over to a government for equitable distribution., and that’s also great.

But we lose something when we do that. Because it is entirely possible to understand the world in ways that do better justice to what we actually experience when we relate to one another and participate in beings that we know transcend us. It does better justice to our moral insights and experiences of awe, beauty and love.

This understanding does better justice to scientific and technological practices and understandings than scientific and technological understandings and practices can do to it. But none of this can be explained in scientific and technological terms.

Taking this latter road makes all the difference. Everything changes because one’s own everything has changed.

Kill the giants

Philosophy

According to Wikipedia the expression “standing on the shoulders of giants” originated with William of Conches:

The ancients had only the books which they themselves wrote, but we have all their books and moreover all those which have been written from the beginning until our time.… Hence we are like a dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant. The former sees further than the giant, not because of his own stature, but because of the stature of his bearer. Similarly, we [moderns] see more than the ancients, because our writings, modest as they are, are added to their great works.

I was going to say that the dwarfs despise the giants for being so short and lowly, but I think that adds little to the original text.

So, yeah, what William of Conches said: we all intellectually, and in some ways morally, perch upon the shoulders of giants.

But it is important to recognize that our perch gives us much more than an expansive view of the objects around us. Our height also gives us a lofty subjectivity — a subjectivity who not only sees and knows, but also judges and feels from a height.

We lose something crucial when we naively assume that this altitude is our natural birthright. When height is all we have ever known, it is easy to take for granted the layers upon layers of understanding that have raised us further and further above barbarity.

We cannot imagine how life might be at lower elevations. We are incapable of imagining ourselves as possible selves born in barbarous times and conditions. We confuse the peaceful, sensitive, reasonable second-natures instilled in the nursery with primordial nature herself.

Even without civilization, we think, we would have had the virtues, attitudes and understandings essential to who we are.

We keep the gifts of civilization, but lose all gratitude. We steal the gifts of our ancestors.

But we go from ingratitude to depravity when we start blaming the giants for the heights we have not yet reached, when we see the giants beneath us not as a tower lifting us up but iron chains holding us down. We think that if we untether ourselves from the bloody dirt around the giants’ feet, we will float up to the utopian heaven where we belong.

So we punch down, kick down, drop heavy rocks, pour molten lead and buckets of acid on the past. Once the giants are dead to us, their accomplishments forgotten, their teachings unlearned, the chains will corrode, dissolve and vanish into oblivion. Finally, we are free.

Spiritual prosopagnosia

Philosophy

Materialists suffer from spriritual prosopagnosia.

Prosopagnosiacs cannot recognize faces, so they are unable to identify the same person in different settings.

To someone who can recognize faces, it is immediately obvious when the same person is doing different acts. To a prosopagnosiac, determining whether a person doing an act on different days requires an elaborate process of observation and reasoning.

Spiritual prosopagnosiacs cannot recognize the same soul in different contexts.

Materialists believe only in material reality, so they can’t recognize that the same soul across multiple acts for the simple reason that, to them, souls aren’t real. Souls are a quaint way to characterize minds. And minds are epiphenomena of brains.

So if you can’t point to some continuous material entity, or continuous network of entities, that causes something, there is no real responsible being . There is only an image, projection, confusion or propagandistic notion on the part of the person seeing it.

A spiritual prosopagnosiac cannot recognize individual souls, and are unable to tell when an intimate has changed souls on them, as sometimes happens, and is no longer faithful to them. Same brain means same person. Being unfaithful is something a person’s body does. If the body hasn’t been unfaithful, then everything is the same.

But things become impossible if a collective psyche — an egregore — is behind various public events. This requires a process of observation and reasoning so elaborate that it borders on impossible. And for a materialist, that kind of impossibility is strong evidence, if not proof, of nonexistence. They dissolve delusions with rigor.

Prosopagnosia is rare, so prosopagnosiacs tend to recognize their condition. Not so with spiritual prosopagnosiacs. They are, in fact, participants in a collective soul that imparts spiritual prosopagnosia on its participants.

I’d write more but my invisible elephant needs to be taken out for his daily walk.